Abstract :
Rendering high quality soft shadows from area light sources is necessary to increase the level of realism. Quality soft shadows are closely related to the visibility computation. An accurate visibility information improves the shadows realism. However, this remains a challenging problem since even small visibility approximations can lead to unacceptable errors in a picture. We propose a new approach to this problem, based on an exact visibility pre-computation, done in the Plucker space. It takes advantage of this first step to provide an exact from-point visibility query algorithm. We propose several results in a ray tracing application, where the direct illumination at any given point is provided with a fast computation, and with a high degree of quality.
Keywords :
lighting; query processing; ray tracing; realistic images; rendering (computer graphics); visibility; Plucker space; area light source; fast direct illumination; high quality soft shadow rendering; ray tracing; shadow realism; visibility approximation; visibility computation; visibility information; visibility query algorithm; Computer graphics; Image quality; Image sampling; Layout; Light sources; Lighting; Ray tracing; Rendering (computer graphics); Silicon carbide; Skeleton;
